


On the Naming of Emotions

by what_alchemy



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:25:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In navigating the precarious path between emotion and logic, Spock has always had good guides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Naming of Emotions

First, he learns shame. It is a roiling, oily thing that grips his innards and prickles hot at his consciousness. It is the curve of Mother’s cheek, the soft touch of her hand on his hair, Father’s impenetrable gaze, and, inevitably, how Father turns away. It is in the scorn of his peers and the detached curiosity of adults. It is in his own fumbling fingers, his clumsy feet, his unVulcan child-weight.

“Clear your mind of all thoughts,” Lady Versana says in low tones, walking a measured pace between the rows of cross-legged children seated on the floor. “Be only in the boundless now.”

Spock watches as she touches light fingertips to Stemas’s temple when she pauses beside him. For a moment, she is unnaturally still, but then her hand drops, and she moves onward without ceremony. She repeats the mind-touch on S’entak, T’Ravi, Kembol, Sonden, T’Ala, Vator. Spock squeezes his eyes shut hurriedly when Lady Versana’s journey brings her to his row, his lack of focus and roving eyes apparent. When he feels her fingers so gentle at the side of his face, he is thinking of the space between the stars, and he calls it peace in nothingness – the boundless now.

“All creatures are students on the path to logic, Spock.” Lady Versana’s voice echoes tinny and disembodied as it pervades the blackness. “From the lowly ant to the masters of Gol, we find our own way. You carry pain like bags of sand in the desert. It need not be so.”

“I am like the lowly ant, Lady.”

“The ant follows its prescribed purpose, supremely logical in service to its queen. The ant does not bemoan the fact that it is an ant.”

“Then I am lower than an ant, Lady.”

“No, Spock,” he hears her say, tender as his own human mother. “You are unique, with your own purpose. Perhaps that purpose, in the business of your external life, is to reveal the illogic of prejudice. Show me where your conflict resides.”

In the darkness, Spock leads his instructor down low into the deep wells of Self, as if his spine is a ladder and his bowels a cauldron. There, a vile potion curdles a sick, pale yellow, toxic grey fumes encroaching on Spock’s consciousness.

“Spock,” Lady Versana murmurs in the black. “We call this _mesh_ , shame. You will harness it now, and put it in its proper place in your mind. Like all emotion, you name it, acknowledge it, own it, and set it aside.

“Like boxes?”

“Like boxes.”

Spock’s shame gels and solidifies, covered tight like Mother’s Earth possessions in the small, topmost room of Sarek’s ancestral home, a place Spock is forbidden to enter. He saw the boxes once when Mother fetched a girlhood plaything, a worn stuffed rabbit missing its shiny false eyes that she erroneously believed would comfort him after an unfortunate encounter with Stonn, Tevak and Sonden. The boxes were stacked one on top of the other, straight and precise. It appealed to him.

Spock boxes his shame thus. Too big to fit in only one, Spock’s shame fills several boxes, and he stacks them with exacting care, their corners square against each other, the lines flawless. He sets them in one deeply ensconced compartment of his consciousness, a place that will house many boxes throughout his life, a place he will someday learn is cluttered, despite the limitless reaches of his mind-space. The boxes of shame are neat and labeled, and Spock feels satisfaction because he does not know he must also box that away. But he cannot keep the thick smoke from escaping those porous boxes, rank and unclean.

—

As he ages, Spock comes to understand that his emotions are not singular things, but complicated and tangled. Sometimes, when he is weak and uncontrolled, he lets his indefatigable imagination picture his body as containing a whole unseen universe within it, and there, through the frontal lobe star system into the far reaches of the phalanges galaxy, his emotions slosh together, sticky and inextricable; they have become impossible to box. Affection is there, named Mother, named T’Pring, named I-Chaya, burning as brightly as Eridani, deep and intense, but tempered by guilt and embarrassment. All of his boxes, blown open and collapsed as they are, have a secondary label now: guilt.

The mind-arts instructors of his childhood had oversimplified the process of reining in emotion. Spock understands that children, lacking the necessary controls in the early stages of development, require such simplification. But, as his reedy body stretches and flares, as his mind and understanding of his place in reality mature, he resents his past instructors for giving him a straightforward respite from his turmoil, only to have the passage of time take it away. It is telling that despite this, he is also grateful for the solace their instruction once offered, and guilty for misplacing blame, and angry, always angry. At his peers and his parents and his instructors and the elders and always, most acutely, at himself. And there is hate, searing and jagged, aimless and omnipresent. Deep inside his bodily universe, all these emotions rock up against skin and bone, tendon and muscle, bursting from over-full boxes whose labels are too small for the myriad emotions they are meant to name.

Spock learns that his emotions are violent, dangerous, and plural. He is suspended from Shi’kar National Secondary School when Stonn reveals who broke his nose during the mid-day dining period. He has disappointed his mother. He has brought dishonor to Sarek’s house. His boxes are scattered and he, he is unworthy of the name Vulcan.

In the wake of the incident, Elder Mavrok tutors Spock in meditation privately, his brown eyes impassive, his mind like the cool, night-time air of the northern mountain climes.

“Indeed,” he says, his deep, calm voice quenching the fires that lick treacherously along the edges of Spock’s inner landscape, “your emotions are consumptive and knotted, difficult to conquer. However, you make a false assumption, Spock.”

“Correct me, Elder.”

“You believe such emotion marks you as insufficiently Vulcan. You are incorrect.”

Spock’s bile rises, burning his gullet with bitterness and reproach.

“A true Vulcan would control so rigidly the manifestation of emotion that he would cease to feel its effects at all.”

To his wonder – another emotion Spock cannot control, particularly when he is reading scientific journals or peering through his telescope at distant planets – Spock feels a wave of amusement wash over him. Mavrok’s amusement.

“Such as most Vulcans would have us believe, _nu’ri-veh_ , young one,” Mavrok says, the cooling balm of his mind in Spock’s now sparking with happy light. “But we are a volatile people. We are proud and fierce. We love and hate. We choose logic not because we do not feel, but in order to navigate those feelings with dignity, in keeping with civilized modes of comportment.”

“I believed myself to be alone, my conflict a product of my bloodline.”

“No, Spock,” Mavrok says, a soothing breeze infusing their link. “You are merely more honest about it. You are as truly Vulcan as Surak himself.”

—

Spock meditates during the majority of his off-shift hours. He finds human social customs somewhat distressing and contrary to his reserved nature, and thus he has built no friendships on the _Yorktown_. Though ostracized on Vulcan and largely ignored among the mostly human population at Starfleet Academy, Spock has hardly spent his life friendless. Ta’shek had been accepted to the biology track at the Vulcan Science Academy, where his skin color would not be an anomaly to be targeted as it was when they were children. He writes to Spock not frequently but regularly, and they share their discoveries, their experiments, their successes and failures. T’Pring, of course, had once been a close confidante, in flesh and spirit both, but as Spock’s exploits on the _Yorktown_ with the charismatic Captain Pike became Federation news-fodder, T’Pring’s transmissions grew increasingly terse until they stopped altogether. Spock persists in sending her the occasional anecdote relevant to her interests in telepathic linguistics, but he identifies a feeling of disheartenment as time passes and he receives no replies. In the boundless now, he is one with this disheartenment for a timeless interval, until he opens his eyes in his quarters and the tempered glass window reveals that he is hurtling through the wide open universe at warp speed, his heavy disappointment condensed, tucked away, and left behind.

He would not be averse to companionship during his service on the _Yorktown_. Indeed, he would welcome it. Cultivating social ties is a healthy necessity for Vulcans and humans alike, but Spock is frozen among his human colleagues, awkward and wooden, and, he knows, unforgivably humorless. He makes the humans uncomfortable, which is not conducive to friendship, so he retreats to his quarters, where he meditates his pointless yearning away. It is a pattern with no end, a hopeless fugue of isolation, but Spock is ill-equipped to correct the situation and remedy his ongoing solitude.

When First Officer Chapel, who answers only to the baffling epithet “Number One,” takes an interest in his work on the reproductive habits of Rigellian ham-faced spice toads, Spock must hastily catalogue a complicated mixture of hope, pride and dread, and braces himself for disappointment, as well. Distantly he has admired the way Number One’s facial expressions reveal nothing of her thoughts. She is logical and efficient, and, when he is honest with himself in the boundless now, he can admit that she is aesthetically pleasing with her austere, statuesque physique. But he is promised to T’Pring and desires his betrothed in body and mind, so Number One’s varied charms become but bullet points in his assessment of her character.

Spock boxes up his fear that she will leave him to his isolation when the spice toad research comes to a close, but even weeks after the toads have been jarred, she slides in beside him at mealtimes, all fluid grace. Still she meets his eyes without flinching as they debate and compare the respective virtues of Surak’s teachings and Mahayana tradition. Still she seeks him out when their off-duty hours coincide, and they sit completing paperwork in silent togetherness.

The time comes when icy blue eyes fix their shrewd gaze on him, and he knows with a cold lick in the well of Self that she is going to say something he will have to spend days meditating on to integrate.

“I must be honest with you,” she says without preamble, linking her hands on the table. “The captain asked me to spend time with you because you seemed isolated. My initial interest in spice toad mating habits was feigned.”

Some feeling Spock cannot identify rises and shatters within him at the admission.

“And now that you have completed your duty, you intend to return our relationship to its previous state of virtual nonexistence,” he says, following her statement to its logical, lonely conclusion.

“No,” she says, confounding him. She does not smile for reassurance as other humans would. In the interminable pause, Spock flounders for his controls. “I merely felt that allowing you to believe that I initiated contact of my own accord was disingenuous. We are friends now, are we not, Spock?”

Spock, dumb, emotions turbulent within his bodily universe, nods warily.

“Then we are friends,” Number One confirms, sitting back in her chair. “By mutual decision and choice. It is better this way, knowing that we would choose each other.”

She holds his gaze for a silent 4.3 seconds longer, then slides a fingertip over her padd screen, and once again puts to use her notorious efficiency.

Spock feels something wholly new. He names it “dauntless devotion and helpless admiration” and allows it free rein, unboxed and lighting his well of Self explosively, just for one evening.

—

Vulcan implodes and takes with it more than six billion screaming Vulcans — and Mother. Mother, whose eyes held so much fear and sorrow and knowing; Mother, whose title is an annotation on each internal box of emotion; Mother, who gave him life and guidance and unwavering love. Spock vomits alone in his quarters after he has avenged Mother but has not been allowed to sacrifice himself for that vengeance. He is cleaning the emesis up when the howling emptiness that was once his marriage bond informs him that he has lost T’Pring as well.

What Spock feels now he identifies not as emotions but as genuine physical needs. He needs to touch another being in the most elemental connection available to a telepathic mind housed in a flesh body. He needs to be surrounded, he needs his body inside another body and his mind soothed inside another mind. He needs consumptive collision. He is weak, and he knows that it is much to ask, but his needs defy logic as surely as the absence of Vulcan in space defies belief. So he gathers the tattered remains of his control long enough to move his bones and blood through the corridors of the officers’ decks until he reaches Nyota Uhura’s quarters and buzzes for entry.

Spock is brutal once invited into Nyota’s bed. In her agitated mindscape, his grief and guilt and anger and hatred and satisfaction and lust rush like avalanches from the shattered well of Self into Nyota’s own prone body and mind. Horror – he cannot hope to tame it – floods him when he has sated himself and comes out of the mindless haze to find Nyota limp beneath him, hair askew, tears standing in her eyes as she gapes up at him in shock and disbelief. Spock gives a despairing, wordless cry and slides off of her, curling helplessly onto his side with his knees drawn into his chest, shaking so badly that her bed rattles against the bulkhead. A distant part of himself still embracing logic berates him for the unspeakable sin of revealing his true nature as a feral, wounded animal.

Later Spock will recall this night and label Nyota’s actions as “unbearable forgiveness,” and he will place the memory and the mess of emotions it invokes among the stacks by shame and guilt. He feels her move up close behind him, molding her cool, naked body against the quaking curve of his back. Though he savaged and used her like the lowest kind of brute, she brings her arms around him and holds on as tightly as her human strength will allow. Her tears, like precious rain on a desert planet that no longer exists, drip down his neck where she presses all her anguish. He can feel through the nerves along the length of her body against his that she mourns not for herself but for him, for a loss so staggering that she has no sufficient words in any of the forty-eight languages she speaks with native fluency.

—

When Spock steps off the transport shuttle in Iowa City, Jim is waiting for him outside the terminal, leaning back against an antiquated ground car with his arms crossed. He glances up as if sensing Spock’s arrival, and his stance unfurls, his arms opening and reaching out, careless of the public space. Spock accepts the embrace with relief; it has been five weeks and three days and an odd number of hours since he has held Jim, smelled him, felt his stubble scratch along his neck. Jim hugs too tight, shaking.

“I am sorry, _taluk-veh_ ,” Spock says. He does not know any more appropriate words.

“Fucking emphysema,” Jim croaks into a shoulder. “Of all the _stupid_ shit. She didn’t even smoke.”

Spock strokes a gentle hand down Jim’s back. He will not offer tired human platitudes or infuriating Vulcan truisms, but he feels he must say something.

“You were with her,” he says. “Surely it was a comfort to her.”

Jim pulls back and turns his face away as if he cannot bear for Spock to see him scrubbing away the weariness and stubbornly persistent tears, even after forty years.

“Everyone dies alone, Spock,” he says, opening the passenger’s side door to usher Spock into the vehicle. “No one can cross with you.” He closes the door, refusing to meet Spock’s eyes. When he clambers into the driver’s seat and turns the keys in the ignition, Spock ventures,

“Nature is both gracious and cruel.”

“Yes,” Jim says, voice gruff. “Yes, it is.”

Jim is stonefaced at the service though his hand clenches and unclenches in Spock’s, and his brother appears pinched and harassed. Jim’s nephews are tall and stoic in their pressed black suits, and their several offspring stand sullen and silent beside them. There is no casket, no ashes; Winona had her body donated to Starfleet Medical, where she will be picked and prodded and peeled and passed around until there is nothing left to study.

When it is time to return to the farmhouse, Jim allows Spock to fold him into the bed and tuck the blankets around him like a sick child. Downstairs, what’s left of the Kirks and the Harrisons crack open beers and toast a complicated woman who led a complicated life, but Spock settles into an easy chair to watch her youngest son fall into an exhausted, fitful sleep. Spock runs his fingers through greying hair and savors him.

“Tell me about Vulcan-past.”

“It was a vast desert under a clear sky. On it flourished civilization and knowledge. Beneath its burning sands and deep into the bedrock, the blood of fierce warriors stained the foundation.”

“Who lived there?”

“A proud people who eschewed emotion for logic. A race sturdy in body and mind, but like vulnerable children in matters of the heart.”

“How could they bear it?”

“They peered into a sterile abyss and recoiled. They tied their minds to the balm of another’s. In unison they espoused the tenets of logic, all the while entwining their fingers against the swallowing black.”

“But not you.”

“No, Jim, not me.”

“You found something better.”

“In the boundless now, I stood with my bondmate between reason and sentiment, and I chose a middle path. I chose my mother and my father, I chose myself, and I chose you, Jim. I fell in love and called it love. I dared not hide it away.”  



End file.
